At 2, hospital finding its stride

Stroke specialist Dr. Erik Hauck said he has seen about 200 cases in his first four months at Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend in Springfield.

“The practice has taken off rapidly,” he said. “From day one I saw patients who needed to be operated on.”

Hauck, an endovascular neurosurgeon, treats vascular disorders of the brain and spinal cord. “What I do nobody (else) does basically between Portland and San Francisco,” Hauck said.

In addition to treating local patients, who previously traveled to Portland or San Francisco for certain procedures, Hauck has seen patients from as far away as Northern California and Hawaii, he said.

His practice is an example of what PeaceHealth officials aspired to when they opened the $537.6 million, 386-bed hospital two years ago this week. They wanted RiverBend to enhance the level of care, so that local patients could have complex procedures done in town, with their family support systems nearby. And they wanted RiverBend to be a regional medical center, providing care not just to Lane County residents, but also for those in Coos, Douglas, Linn and Benton counties — and, in some cases, beyond.

RiverBend opened on Aug. 10, 2008, and after working out the kinks of operating in a brand-new facility, is finding its rhythm and making strides toward deepening and broadening its specialty medical care, hospital officials said.

Among Sacred Heart’s specialty centers are the six-year-old Oregon Heart and Vascular Institute and the three-year-old NeuroScience Institute. And hospital officials said they constantly help local medical practices to recruit clinicians with new skill sets. Two recent hires were a surgeon with specialized training in critical care and a gynecological oncologist.

“It’s been an amazing two years for us,” said Jill Hoggard Green, Sacred Heart administrator and COO for PeaceHealth Oregon Region.

PeaceHealth, a Catholic-­sponsored nonprofit health system with headquarters in Bellevue, Wash., operates seven hospitals in Oregon, Washington and Alaska, including its flagship, RiverBend.

PeaceHealth employs 5,000 people at its four hospitals in Lane County, PeaceHealth Medical Group and PeaceHealth Laboratories in Springfield, the state’s largest private lab.

The opening of RiverBend “certainly allowed us to introduce new services,” Hoggard Green said. Between the two Sacred Heart Medical Centers, one at RiverBend and another near the University of Oregon in Eugene, “there’s a very small percentage of patients we cannot care for,” Hoggard Green said.

Sacred Heart doesn’t have a burn center — such centers typically are located in cities with 2 million to 3 million people — and Sacred Heart partners with the children’s hospitals in Portland for high-risk pediatric cases, she said.

When the doors at RiverBend slid open for the first time in the summer of 2008, no one knew that the most severe recession in decades would begin to show itself later that year.

“We’ve all just walked through one of the worst economic times,” Hoggard Green said. “Most hospitals around the state saw significant reduction in their volumes. Last year, “we were one of the few hospitals that continued to grow patient volumes.”

She attributes that to Sacred Heart at RiverBend becoming better known in the community and its role as a “regional referral center,” serving a broader region than just the Eugene-Springfield area. About 30 percent of the patients served by the hospital come from outside the area, she said.

With emergency rooms at both its RiverBend and University District campuses, Sacred Heart has seen a 20 percent increase in emergency care, and those cases were more severe than in the past, she said.

Hoggard Green cautions that a trend cannot be determined without several years of data, but she said she believes “we’re seeing sicker patients from the area because we’re able to handle them.”

Without better data it’s also difficult to determine whether more cases are being referred to RiverBend from smaller hospitals in outlying counties.

“We don’t have any data about what shifts there might be towards RiverBend,” said Paul Janke, CEO of Bay Area Hospital, a 130-bed community hospital in Coos Bay.

“It feels like there may be more referrals over there, but I don’t have any hard data that speaks to that,” he said.

In Douglas County, just south of Lane County, Mercy Medical, a 144-bed community hospital in Roseburg, hasn’t seen any change in the number of transfers from Mercy to Sacred Heart since RiverBend opened, spokeswoman Kathleen Nickel said.

“We send out patients in need of higher level care than what we provide,” she said. For example, a patient with a brain injury might get transferred to Portland or Eugene, she said. Emergency department physicians make the determination of the best place to send the patient for care, she said.

Hoggard Green said that Sacred Heart was hamstrung in its former facility and the expansion at RiverBend opened up many new opportunities.

“We didn’t have the capacity,” she said. “We didn’t have the next level of technology. We couldn’t build new operating rooms. Now, we have new technologies that are allowing the next generation of services.”